


Little soul, gentle and drifting

by Radiolaria



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Aging, Alternate Timelines, Gap Filler, Gen, Introspection, Missing Scene, Quintuple Drabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-14
Updated: 2014-04-14
Packaged: 2018-01-19 10:14:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1465618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Apalapucia, Amy learns to fiddle with joys.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little soul, gentle and drifting

**Author's Note:**

> Written (quickly) for the ["pleasure" challenge](http://who-contest.livejournal.com/188736.html) at [who_contest ](http://who-contest.livejournal.com/).  
> Title from _Memoirs of Hadrian_ by Marguerite Yourcenar.

She writes for the heck of it at first.

There’s paper on a counter. A long time to wait -the Doctor doing the rescue after all. Still hope.

She needs distraction from her panic.

He doesn’t come. She waits.

Confident, she denies herself all the thoughts that could make it easier –it won’t be long. The smile she dodges upon catching herself in a mirror and seeing her mother. The relief of knowing she acquires an equanimity even Rory with years of living together could not nurture in her. The pride she feels bubble up inside the first time she slays one of the handbots, thinks of the material she could nick to assemble the sonic probe and successfully hacks the interface -for a time she hopes he would be proud of her.

What she denies herself, she writes down. Not to remember. To lock away. Daily.

***

The day she becomes older than her daughter, she cries.

With the years, she finds herself laughing when she understands that in growing old she mimics River rather than Tabetha. She abandons happiness, settling for some kind of serenity. Just so. Once, she chooses very precisely to navigate from one moment of pleasure to another, however tiny.

A walk in the garden. A late night at the cinema. A fight with a handbot on the artificial seashore.

All the sunsets she could dream of in one evening.

In her defence, she retired early from life.

***

The Glasmir Mountains become her favourite place to write.

Finding inspiration is tricky. The first twenty two years of her life are a patch of dirt she tends to for hours. Hoping to grow out of it a life in fiction. She had known the Doctor for a year and it had felt like a lifetime. And now, from childish embraces and impish glances, lost to time, she attempts to forecast lives and happy endings.

She has no ending left and Rory has no hands to hold hers. So her characters do.

***

Her attention latches on such delicacies to make her smile –wrinkles, silence, darning. She collects specks of respite.

She won’t hate him, or Rory, or River –surely, River would know how to bring her home. She writes down for _them_ at first.

After a while, she does it because it’s her life.

(She doesn’t care that much if the handbots she tricks into sparring are more and more frequently nicknamed “the Doctor”.)

She never stops waiting.

In Apalapucia, there is, tucked in a corner of the Temporal engines, a book. Hand-bound, with nylon strings as ties and bistro menus as covers. Each page is a different colour; one is the back of a pirate-themed festival program, the other a receipt for spare ventilation parts. The first notes are lipstick red, blotchy words. She found a pen afterwards. Amy called it the Book of Joys, but never wrote down the title, feeling foolish.

When Amy dies, there is no one to remember it.


End file.
